Tag Archives: Twitter Card

When Twitter launched Twitter Cards last year, ThingLink was the first interactive image solution approved by Twitter. Thanks to you, we’ve expanded the possibilities for engagement on Twitter beyond even their expectations.

While Twitter continues to evolve and refine the Twitter Card program, the Player Card that enables ThingLink is being scaled back to focus on video and audio solutions only. As a result, ThingLink will transition to an interim Twitter Card.

Here’s how it works: When you post a ThingLink image to Twitter, viewers on desktop and mobile devices will see the image with icons indicating interactivity just like before. Those icons will no longer be interactive inside Twitter. A click on the image, title or the URL provided with the tweet will lead the viewer to the interactive image on the user’s channel at ThingLink.com.

Because a majority of viewers on Twitter click back to ThingLink anyway, we think this solution will advantage both viewers and brands sharing ThingLink images on Twitter.

The current Twitter Player Card will remain active until September 30 after which all ThingLink users will transition to the interim Twitter Card.

For more visual information, check our slideshare presentation about this transition.

In the coming months we will be working with Twitter to enable a new Twitter Card type that enables interactive functionality on Twitter and delivers a consistent performance on both web and mobile devices.

Twitter is also requesting feedback from ThingLink about the kinds of Card experiences our publishers want to see inside the Twitter channel. Please send us your feedback on how you would like ThingLink images to perform inside Twitter.

In the meanwhile, if you have any questions about ThingLink and Twitter, please contact our COO Cyril Barrow.

This week we released our ThingLink Twitter Card, which allows anyone to browse the live tags in ThingLink interactive images inside a Tweet at Twitter.com.

You can now create an image on ThingLink with in-image links to video and sound players, share it on Twitter, touch the image and interact with the links without having to leave Twitter. This innovation opens up for new opportunities for personal expression as well as marketing opportunities for businesses and brands.

ThingLink and Twitter – How to set it up

Now if you haven’t already signed up for ThingLink, do it now. We’ll wait, it only takes 30 seconds.

Then upload or import an image and tag it with any of our supported rich media tags, which you can see in the presentation below:

Share the interactive image on Twitter by clicking “Share” or “Tweet” on top of the image or right clicking the image and selecting “Share image”.

Any user seeing the tweet can now browse the live tags on Twitter without having to leave the image. Click “View Media” and the interactive image opens up. The image is also viewable by clicking the date/time stamp on the Tweet and the status update version of the Tweet will appear with the image and interactivity.

The image must be shared from ThingLink.com to be viewable inside Twitter. We also suggest that you set up your own channel on ThingLink to allow for people to easily find other interactive images that you’ve created.

NOTE: Twitter is still testing Twitter Cards with certain users/sessions. The ThingLink-Twitter integration works on ThingLink.com, Twitter’s mobile client and Tweetdeck’s web version. Hopefully it will work on third party clients in the future.

Tips & Tricks

Twitter will scale down any image that you share from ThingLink.com to 280 or 560 pixels on mobile and 435 pixels on desktop. That means that any messages in the image should be written in larger text and be more prominent for users to quickly see them. It also means that it’s better to use vertical images since the height of the image is not restricted.

BONUS!

We’ve implemented another fun feature for the Twitter Card. If there are Twitter tags in the image, we will detect them and automatically mention the users when you share the image on Twitter. That way the users in the image will be notified of it whenever the image is shared by you or anyone else. Check out this Twitter example below:

ThingLink is the leading provider of image and video interaction tools. Use our tagging platform to layer your images and videos with web links, photos, texts, videos, polls, maps, social media and other great content.